Netgear switch

[itgeek]

Hi please can I have some advice. We are currently running our network on FS726T netgear switch. The netgear website says it is suitable for small to medium sized business. Our school currently has 1700 users and 600pc/laptops, would you consider this to be a medium sized business. Do you think we should upgrade to layer 2 switches?

Thanks

[Joedetic]

In reference to the OSI model, it's kind of a definition of a switch that it operates at layer 2. Yes you can get ones that do inter vlan routing bumping them up to layer 3 (I think that's right?) too, but seeing as switches work on MAC addressing it already is at layer two.

 

Are you finding any issues with bandwidth etc that might warrant an upgrade?

 

If you're not finding any problems then I personally wouldn't see the need to upgrade. Why fix something that's not broke?

[powdarrmonkey]

We use FS726s as our stock switch, along with a couple of gigabit backbones. It's fine for everything we've thrown at it. If you want VLANs and 802.1x authentication, use the managed version FSM726 and stackable FSM726TS.

[FN-GM]

If it works, and does what you want it to don't change it.

 

Z

[Oops_my_bad]

It's hardly a representative view but we have one of these switches as a hot spare. It gives us nothing but trouble but at least it's there should it be needed.

 

If you are looking for a good quality L2 alternative to this switch at a reasonable price point, consider the GSM7224. We have these for all our edge switches and have no issues. You should really be using L2 managed switches anyway according to BECTA and I pretty much agree with them on that score..

[itgeek]

Thanks for all your comments. I think as the network begins to grow I will look at upgrading the switches, to a more advanced switches.

[enjay]

Thanks for all your comments. I think as the network begins to grow I will look at upgrading the switches, to a more advanced switches.

 

That's what we do here - our old cheapy switches which used to be fine everywhere are slowly being phased out as and when new equipment is required. The new big (Gigabit) switch goes into the server room or main teaching suites, pushing the slightly older switches out to the network edges, and the really old switches come off the network and get binned (well, recycled actually but binned sounds more better!).

 

We don't have the funding to replace working switches, but will take the opportunity to "buy better" whenever we do need a new switch (e.g. network growth or hardware failure)